Murder in Orbit (15 page)

I walked over to her and put my arms around her.

She buried her face against my chest and began to cry. I felt like crying, too.

I could feel her trembling.

“I'm frightened,” she said.

If she was only frightened, she was ahead of me. I was downright terrified. And horrified. But it didn't seem like the time to say so.

I held her for just an instant longer than was really necessary. “Can you put yourself together?” I asked. “We've got work to do here.”

She pulled away from me. “Here? Are you crazy? We have to get out of here! Three people are dead already. Do you want to be the fourth?”

“Second.”

“What do you mean?”

“Second dead person. So far poor Dr. Twining is the only person who's actually died.”

Cassie looked at me as if I were crazy. It was a look I had gotten used to.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, sounding as if she had a mouthful of vinegar.

“Dead people. And living ones—which may include Dr. Puckett, if we're both fast and lucky. Now, we can take the time for me to explain all that to you. Or we can look for him, which, considering what just happened, would be my recommendation. Under the circumstances, I can't guarantee ‘she'—whoever she is—is going to keep him alive much longer.”

Cassie started to protest, then thought better of it. “Shouldn't we call someone?” she asked, glancing over at Dr. Twining's body.

“You can try,” I said. “But I doubt it will go through.”

She went to the console and tapped out a number.

The line was as dead as Dr. Twining.

“All right,” she said grimly. “What do we do now?”

I had just been asking myself the same question. We had come over here looking for information. Now we had a real murder and more new questions than I knew what to do with.

“Let's start with Dr. Twining's private office,” I said.

“Start what?”

“The search.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Any clue to where they might be holding Dr. Puckett.” I paused, then added, “But don't restrict yourself to clues. If you get lucky, you might just skip the clues and find the man.”

She looked at me sideways, still unwilling to believe what she knew I was telling her. I understood her reluctance, especially under the circumstances. It would be too much to bear if she let herself hope that Dr. Puckett was still alive and then found out that he wasn't.

It would be like losing him twice.

I didn't give her a chance to question me; I moved into the office and started tearing it apart.

It wasn't going to be easy. Dr. Twining was hardly what you would call a born criminal. But he was more than bright enough to cover his tracks when he wanted to.

I had been in his private office three or four times before, mostly when he wanted to have some conference about my work. The basic layout was pretty much the same as Dr. Durkin's. I figured that was probably true of all seven of the major labs in the BS Factory. Professional jealousy made it unlikely that anyone would have an office significantly better—or even significantly different—than anyone else's. The major way in which Dr. Twining's differed from Dr. Durkin's was in the furnishings, which were considerably more sparse. But then, Dr. Twining had never demonstrated much of a taste for luxury. Aside from the desk and computer, his room held a large table, littered with personal papers and several months' worth of magazines and journals; a battered purple easy chair, and a long, comfortable-looking sofa, where I had a feeling he often spent the night. Notes and diagrams relating to his work covered the walls.

“Check the bathroom,” I said to Cassie as she came into the room behind me. I was already going through Dr. Twining's desk.

I've heard my grandfather complain that going through people's desks isn't what it used to be. There was a time when you could count on people keeping most of their important papers in their desk drawers. Now the good stuff is usually locked up in their computer.

That seemed to be the case with Dr. Twining. Nothing I could find in his desk seemed to mean anything.

“Nothing in there,” said Cassie, coming out of the bathroom. “What's behind that door?”

She was pointing to a door in the back of the room, in about the same location as the one I had seen Dr. Durkin use earlier that day when I was hiding in
his
office.

I didn't know.

“Shall I try it?” she asked.

I hesitated. The problem with doors in that place was that you couldn't open them just a crack and peek through. You pushed a button and they slid into the wall, and there you were, completely exposed to whoever was on the other side.

It was enough to give a snoop a nervous breakdown.

“Is there an intercom?” I asked. “Any way we might be able to check on what's on the other side?”

She searched the frame. “Got it,” she whispered after a moment.

She pushed a button, then pulled her hand away as if she had been burned.

I didn't blame her.

I had been hoping we would be able to tell if there was anyone on the other side of the door; maybe pick up voices, or even a conversation.

What we got was an angry babble of shouting people.

That, and the most bloodcurdling scream I had ever heard.

Chapter 22

Air Ducts

When I heard that scream, I did what I generally do: acted first, and thought later.

It was simple, really. Someone was in trouble. And when someone's in trouble, you help. That's what I was always taught. That's what Macdonald of Terra always did.

Except he was usually a little brighter about it than I am.

But really, I couldn't help myself. When that scream came stabbing through the intercom, it seemed like there was only one thing to do.

So I did it. Dashing past Cassie, I jabbed the Open button at the side of the door. Then I stood there waiting for it to slide into the wall so I could rush through and help whoever was in trouble.

Fortunately for the White Knight of the BS Factory, the door was locked.

“Nice work, boy wonder,” said Cassie after a moment or so. “Are you sure you're not secretly harboring some kind of death wish?”

“Someone's in trouble!” I said, still not thinking entirely clearly.

“I can think of at least three people who are in trouble,” she replied. “And two of them are you and me.”

She had a point.

“Maybe we should take this a little more slowly,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Your brilliance outshines the sun.”

I walked back to Dr. Twining's desk. “We've got to find out what's on the other side of that door,” I said, tapping a command into his computer. “I know there's another door just like it in Dr. Durkin's office. Probably in all the offices. But I don't know where they lead. Could be anything back there.”

The machine began to beep. “Access denied,” read the screen.

I stood up and headed for the lab. “Come on,” I said to Cassie. “And bring your magic card with you.”

The computer in Dr. Twining's office was for his use only, as were most of the computers in the lab. They operated strictly on personal passwords. But each lab also had at least one computer that could be accessed by means of an ID card. I headed for ours.

“Log on,” I said to Cassie, standing aside and gesturing toward the seat.

She did. The computer acknowledged her existence and the extremely high level of her access code.

“What do you want me to look for?” she asked, once she was into the system.

“The plans for this deathtrap,” I said. “I want to know what's behind that wall and if there's any way we can get there.”

She furrowed her brow and tapped in a command. It brought up some generally useless information. She tried again. We got a twenty-item menu that looked like it might possibly lead us where we wanted to go.

Tracking down something like this on a computer can be like trying to find one specific apple on a tree. You start out on the trunk. As soon as it starts to branch, you have to make a choice about which way to go. Using whatever clues you've got, you take the path that makes the most sense. More branches, more choices. Maybe you make six different choices before you get to the end of a branch. If when you get there you find the wrong apple, which is to say if you've taken the wrong path, you go back and start again.

Sometimes you go back just a few branches; sometimes you have to go all the way back to the trunk.

That was basically the process we were following now. It's a good thing the computer was relatively fast. Otherwise I might have gone out of my mind before we found the path that led us to something useful. More than once I wanted to push Cassie aside and attack the keyboard myself, though I knew that wouldn't really speed things up any.

“Air ducts!” I shouted as she pulled up another submenu.

“What?”

I pointed to the menu. “Try the air ducts!”

It was just what we needed. With a tap of a key she called up a map of the air-duct system for the entire BS Factory.

“Now pull up the specs,” I said eagerly.

She did. We were in luck. About half of the ducts were large enough to crawl through.

I don't know how long we spent going over the system. With the memory of that scream echoing in my head, it seemed like hours. In reality, I doubt it was even ten minutes.

The computer was being very obliging about showing us close-ups and cutaway sections. What it wouldn't do was provide an accurate label of what was behind Dr. Twining's wall, even when we found a clear diagram of the complete BS Factory. Most of what the diagram showed I already knew. The bulk of the facility was divided among the seven major labs, which formed a circle around the perimeter of the station. Other areas were set aside for storage, for meetings, even guest rooms where visiting officials could spend the night if they wanted.

All these were clearly marked.

But the central area, which could be accessed from all seven labs, and which I had never seen before, was labeled “Storage.”

I didn't believe it for a minute. That area was being used for something besides storage.

Even Cassie-the-cynic agreed that must be the case.

Once we finally had a good sense of the system, Cassie had the computer print out a couple of maps for us.

Then we returned to Dr. Twining's office.

“There,” I said, pointing to the wall opposite his desk.

The air vent, which was located near the ceiling, was easily two feet on each side. Climbing into it would be no problem at all, if we could just get the baffle off.

That was a fairly big
if
. Depending on the construction techniques that had been used, it might be held on with nothing but snaps, or it might be bolted in with fasteners that required a special tool to undo.

I was hoping for the former.

With Cassie's help I maneuvered the large treatment table underneath the vent. In the low gravity, it was easy to climb up on the thing without straining my bum hip.

I stuck my fingers through the grating and yanked.

Nothing happened.

Flexing my arms, I pulled myself up so that I could look through the vent. I was so light I could probably have held myself straight out from the wall if I had wanted.

The vent was locked in place by simple bracket fasteners, one at each corner. Holding myself up with my left hand, I put my right-hand fingers through and twisted them.

Once the fasteners were loosened the vent slipped out as easily as a watermelon seed slips between your fingers.

Hanging from the edge of the vent, I glanced down at Cassie. “You coming? Or would you rather stay here?”

She looked around the office and through the door to where Dr. Twining's body lay in a pool of blood, then flexed her legs and jumped up beside me.

“You're better than no company at all,” she said curtly.

I hoisted myself into the air shaft. Cassie's sharp words would have bothered me, except that I chalked them up to fear. That, and the fact that I knew she was being driven crazy by the same question that was ripping at me: Who had we heard screaming?

Or, to be more specific: Had that scream come from Dr. Elmo Puckett?

Chapter 23

Dr. Durkin

Traveling through the air ducts would have been all right, if not for the corners. The smooth plastic surfaces were clean, and large enough so that we could move through them fairly rapidly. The low gravity helped, of course; instead of crawling along on our bellies as you normally would in a situation like that, we were able to do a kind of fingertip walk that positioned our bodies in the center of the ducts and let us move through them while barely touching them.

But the corners nearly did me in. Every time I had to go around one, I ended up twisting my bad hip in a way that made it feel like it was going to come out of my body. Even so, after we turned the second one, I stopped feeling bad for myself because we could hear the screaming again. Whatever was going on up ahead of us, someone was experiencing a kind of pain and/or fear that made what I felt rounding those corners insignificant by comparison.

“What can it be?” hissed Cassie, a few seconds after we had made the second corner.

I did a kind of push-up, pressing my entire body against the top of the duct. This let me look back underneath myself so that I could see her.

“I don't know,” I whispered as softly as I could. Then I held a finger to my lips to caution her against any more talking, since I also didn't know how far sound would carry through these plastic passages.

We came to a branch in the ducts. I took out the map to see if I could figure out which way we should go, then decided I didn't need it. All I had to do was listen. The screamer would be my guide.